Amazon finally launched their Sydney data centres yesterday and I really wouldn't want to be in the hosting business in Australia. Their pricing is amazing. Same price as Singapore for everything, same price as Ireland for everything except data transfer. Mostly cheaper than even Northern California.

Here's my quick and very un-thorough comparison just looking at the base casual pricing and the smallest (most expensive) tier of data usage:

Resource

Virginia

Ireland

Singapore

Tokyo

Sao Paulo

Sydney

Micro

$ 0.020

$ 0.020

$ 0.020

$ 0.027

$ 0.027

$ 0.020

Small

$ 0.065

$ 0.085

$ 0.085

$ 0.092

$ 0.115

$ 0.085

Medium

$ 0.130

$ 0.170

$ 0.170

$ 0.184

$ 0.230

$ 0.170

Data/GB

$ 0.120

$ 0.120

$ 0.190

$ 0.201

$ 0.250

$ 0.190

There's still space for high-touch supported hosts (waves at the ever-awesome Bulletproof), but they're going to struggle getting much basic, budget business now.

Upside for Australian users of cloud services is you can expect many cloud services to very rapidly improve over the next few weeks as companies that rely on AWS hosting move into the new data centres.